House rules for Robots and NPCs in FAITH

Once more, the Burning Prophets have heeden the call of their souls and they have offered us a tribute in the form of house rules to play FAITH. In this case, the muses have acted through Rui Ramalho and have conceived a set of rules to create and run robot characters and NPCs.

So due to the fact that every now and again, one or more of the members of my rag-tag crew of misfits can’t make it to the game, I thought about having a robotic NPC to fill in, someone that would be good at a couple of things, but bad at everything else (a robot designed to shoot would be bad at running was my idea). A twitter convo with the amazing people at Burning Games later, and here are my rules for robotic characters/NPC. Use them with caution, and let me know how it goes!

ROBOT RULES v 1.0

• Generalist robots have basic (ROOT) abilities. They are a little good at everything but excel at nothing. ATHLETICS, SURVIVAL, INITIATIVE are at 3, all others at 1.
• At level one, you take the ALPHA software package, giving you the ability to raise 3 Skills of your choice to 4. If you have another ALPHA package, and enough time to reprogram the core chip, you can choose to drop any of these three 4-level Skills down to their original level, and raise as many others up to 4 (Effectively changing the speciality of the robot). BETA packages (at higher levels) allow for higher upgrades (5,4,4), and GAMMA higher still (5,5,4).
• A regular robotic frame has the following ATTRIBUTES: AGI 2, CON 2, DEX 1, FAITH 1, LINK 2, MIND 1. (Faith is capped at 1) Frames (i.e. ATTR numbers) can be upgraded by buying a higher-grade one, and downloading the robots’ current core chip to the new one. This will take at least 24 standard hours and requires a skilled technician or engineer.
• Unless otherwise stated, all robots have ARMOUR 1
• They are intelligent, sentient beings, and able to believe in a higher power (Hence Faith)
• The cannot have Bio Upgrades
• They can have LINK + ½ (rounded up) TECH upgrades